Jonathan Blow

In September 2014, Blow began work on a new programming language called "Jai" based on ideas he had previously expressed about video game development. It is aimed at "low-friction" and fluid development, while directly supporting data-oriented design for high performance. The language is currently active, but is a work-in-progress, as no Jaicompiler has been publicly released yet. A small demo of the language was shown at Reboot Develop 2017. Blow also uses Twitch to regularly stream demonstrations of new language features as well as improvements to the game engine that will be bundled with the language.

In 2012, Blow was one of the subjects of the independent documentary film, Indie Game: The Movie, where he discussed his views on the role of independent video games and his work on Braid.

In March 2010, Blow, along with several independent game developers including Ron Carmel and Kellee Santiago, became a founding member of the Indie Fund, an angel investor fund for independent game projects.

Announced in August 2009, The Witness is a 3D first person puzzle game in which a player is stranded on an island, trying to solve various maze puzzles. Like Braid before it, Blow invested his own money—reportedly $2–3 million.

He continued work on the game mostly focusing on art and music while polishing some of the design until its release in 2008 on Xbox Live Arcade. By then, Blow was $40,000 in debt and had invested $200,000 into the game's development.

The game was released on August 8, 2008, to critical acclaim and achieved financial success, receiving an aggregate score of 93% on Metacritic, making it the top-rated Xbox Live Arcade game. Braid was purchased by more than 55,000 people during the first week of release. Blow recalled that he did not receive any money until one day he saw a lot of zeroes in his bank account.

In December 2004, feeling inspired during a trip in Thailand, Blow made a prototype for a time manipulation puzzle platformer game. The demo had crude graphics, but featured the ability of the player to rewind all the objects on screen backwards in time to a previous state. Encouraged by feedback from his peers, Blow worked on the game from about April 2005 to about December that year before having the final prototype of his game, titled Braid. This version won the Independent Games Festival Game Design Award at the 2006 Game Developers Conference.

From 2001 to 2004, Blow wrote the Inner Product column for Game Developer Magazine. He was the primary host of the Experimental Gameplay Workshop each March at the Game Developers Conference, which has become a premier showcase for new ideas in video games. In addition, Blow was a regular participant in the Indie Game Jam. Blow is also a founding partner of the Indie Fund, an angel investor fund for independent game projects.

He worked in San Francisco in contracting jobs, including one with Silicon Graphics to port Doom to a set-top device, until forming the game design company Bolt-Action Software with Bernt Habermeier in 1996. Their initial game project was to be a hovertank-based combat game called Wulfram, but at the time, the video game industry was undergoing a transformation of focusing heavily on three-dimensional graphics, making it difficult for them to complete the project; the team was forced to take some online database work to cover their expenditures. Subsequently, in the wake of the crash of dot-com bubble, they opted to fold the business after four years in 2000, with them $100,000 in debt.

Blow grew up in Rancho Peñasquitos, San Diego, and went to Mt. Carmel High School. He then studied computer science and creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley and was president of the Computer Science Undergraduate Association for a semester. He left the university in 1994, a semester before he would have graduated.

Jonathan David Blow (born (1971-11-03 ) November 3, 1971) is an American video game designer and programmer, who is best known as the creator of the independent video games Braid (2008) and The Witness (2016), both of which were released to critical acclaim.

Blow was born in 1971. His mother was a devout ex-nun who constantly reminded her scientifically inclined young son about the imminent return of Jesus. (When Blow's older sister came out as a lesbian in the mid-1980s, their mother disowned her.) Blow's father, an aerospace engineer manager, worked all day for the defense contractor TRW, then came home and spent every possible moment alone in his den, where the children were not welcome. Blow would say in an interview with The Atlantic, "Early on, I detected that there weren't good examples at home, so I kind of had to figure things out on my own ... I had to adopt a paradigm of self-sufficiency."